What We Were Promised

by Lucy Tan

  On the way to the car, Little Cao rambled on about how difficult it had been to reach anyone of consequence at the Expo, the idiocy of the people he’d dealt with, and how it had taken hours to get hold of a UK pavilion representative with the key to the exhibit. But aside from his chatter, the streets were silent and empty. No bikes on the paths, no directives shouted from storefronts, no peddlers with their piles of hair clips and three-pack socks spread out on tarps. It was too early even for the vendors to be out selling baozi. This was not a Shanghai she had ever known, and Lina looked around, bewildered, as though she were arriving here for the first time.

  During the ride home, Lina kept her face turned toward the window. The cityscape must have been completely transformed since Qiang had seen it in his teens, coming to Shanghai to deliver silks. You’re almost unrecognizable, he’d said to her a few days ago at Yu Gardens as they waited in line for soup dumplings. When was the last time someone had looked at her as closely as he was looking then? That’s funny, she’d thought. With you around, I recognize myself again. But he was only a reminder of her younger self, nothing more. Still, his coming was proof that after all this time, there was still a chance to make amends—not only with him, but with the person she used to be. It frightened her, the ease with which she could arrive in a place without any obvious intention. And yet she could no longer blame her unhappiness on Qiang or Wei. It was no good imagining the other choices she might have made. Dreams of a life lived differently were just that—dreams. No more real than Qiang showing up as a solution to her sadness, just an excuse not to think about the here and now. Lina had a home, and a child, and a husband who did not always know what was best for the family. He needed her help now just as much as he had when they had first moved to America. Somewhere within Lina was the woman who had learned how to make the unfamiliar familiar and build a home out of an environment she did not understand. She would call forth that woman, starting today.

  In Lanson Suites, Lina and Qiang rode the elevator up to the twentieth floor in silence. Qiang’s T-shirt was wrinkled, his jaw bruise-green with a day’s growth of beard. Lina had fixed her hair in the car, but her makeup was a lost cause. The eyeliner had dissipated in the heat, leaving only gray shadows below her tired eyes. She wondered how the two of them would look to others if the car were to stop on floors along the way. Did they seem like lovers? If so, they must look stiff and tired, a whiff of failure about them. And yet, Lina was satisfied. She felt like she had stepped out into the world for the first time in a very long time.

  The apartment was silent when they walked through the door, the furniture bathed in the rose and blue light of dawn. When she turned to look back at Qiang, he shrugged, his crooked smile returning easily to his face.

  “Are you going to talk to Wei?” she asked him. “You know…about everything you told me?”

  “I will,” he said. “I’ll tell him today.”

  She nodded, studying the angles on his face, the curve of his back as he turned toward her. This was good-bye. After they parted she would no longer be able to think of him as a lost love or a missed opportunity. He would become a brother to her, as he was meant to be from the beginning. She grasped his hand and squeezed. He returned the pressure and then bowed his head in a show of respect. Finally, they parted and turned down their separate hallways.

  In the bedroom, Wei lay fully dressed, curled on top of the bed with his back to the door. Lina stripped off her top, dropped her skirt, and embraced him from behind, pressing up against him like an answer to a question.

  He stirred when he felt her weight on him and raised his head to look out the window. The sun had begun to rise over the river.

  “What happened?” he asked, squinting at her. “Did you just get home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did it take so long?”

  “They couldn’t find anyone with a key.” Lina went on to describe the entire adventure—the guard who would not be bribed and then the guard who would, their VIP-lounge drink raid, Qiang digging through the contents of office desk drawers searching for hairpins with which to pick the lock from the inside.

  “I should have known,” Wei said, chuckling. “Same old Qiang, right?”

  “Yeah.” In her tiredness, she forgot for a moment that she was lying on her own bed and instead felt the leather couch beneath her, Qiang warm by her side.

  Then she saw her husband watching her. All the humor had gone from his face. She wondered if some part of him knew—if his avoidance of her and Qiang this past week wasn’t due to his work but was a way of protecting himself from the knowledge of it. Wei’s arm suddenly felt like deadweight across her chest. She imagined him sinking into the bed with each exhale, imagined herself pulling him from its depths.

  Had her father felt this kind of guilt when he came home to her mother after his year away? Remember: Time and commitment. If you have these two things, you can have any manner of love. All these years, she’d thought he’d been teaching her how to find love. Maybe what he’d really been teaching her was that the hard part wasn’t finding love. It was keeping it.

  “Actually, I don’t think Qiang is the same,” she said, running her fingers along Wei’s arm. “I really think he’s different now. He wants to talk to you later today. You should hear him out.” She could feel the muscles in his forearm twitch at her touch. “It’s not your fault he ran away.”

  “I know,” he said. “But I keep thinking about my dad’s life. Since Qiang’s homecoming I’ve been worrying about all the ways I might have let down my ba because of what I did or didn’t do with my life. But I know he would have wanted Qiang back with us.”

  For the first time, Lina forced herself to imagine, realistically, what it would be like to have Qiang in their family again. They’d take trips to Kunming. They’d meet Cloudy.

  “He’s married,” she said. “Did you know that?”

  “No—really?”

  “Yes. To a girl from our hometown.”

  Wei turned so that he was facing the ceiling. “Wah. Maybe he really has changed. Do they have kids?”

  “No.”

  “I wonder why.”

  She and Wei had never talked about whether they wanted children. Never—not even during the time they had trouble conceiving—had they considered the possibility that they would not one day be parents. But Qiang and Cloudy had grown up with a better understanding of the ways parents could fail their children.

  “I think Karen should be educated here,” Lina said.

  In a burst of clarity, she got up on one elbow and stared at Wei. “I want to be the one raising her. She’s an international child, and I think that’s what’s going to give her an advantage later on in life—the ability to move between cultures, speak two languages. There’s a better chance of that happening here than in the U.S.”

  Lina’s parents had wanted her to dream big in both love and life. She had succeeded by taking a chance on America but failed by not making it back before they died. There was time to prevent her child from repeating her own mistakes. It was Lina’s job to raise Karen to be a woman who was not only loving but also resilient and independent. A woman who would have a stronger relationship to whatever combination of people and places she eventually came to consider her home.

  “You might be right,” Wei said finally. “I think that would make her happy. For now, at least. By the way, Karen got her period.”

  “What?”

  “I taught her how to use a tampon.”

  “You what?”

  “Father-daughter project.”

  He was, after all, a man capable of surprising her.

  “Oh, Wei. I should have been here.”

  “It was fine. We did okay. I think she was just nervous.”

  Lina lay back down. “A pad would have been easier,” she said after some thought.

  “Ah?”

  “A pad. A maxi-pad. You just peel and stick. They’re in one of those bottom drawers over there.” />
  “Oh,” he said, disappointed. That was Wei—if the job wasn’t done in the best way possible, he considered it a complete failure.

  The curtains hadn’t been drawn the night before, and now the sun was brimming past their edges. Lina shut her eyes. Its warmth was a welcome-home.

  24

  Little Cao arrived just before noon, by which time Sunny had been awake for hours. Despite the alcohol in her bloodstream—or perhaps because of it—she had woken suddenly at five thirty, mind clear as a chute. For the next few hours, she’d drifted in and out of sleep until she could stay in bed no longer. She got up and showered, ate breakfast, and packed her bag for work, the same as she had almost every day for the past five years.

  “Good morning, mei nü,” Little Cao said when she got into the car. “How do you feel?”

  Even after showering, Sunny was worried that she smelled faintly of the whiskey that she had hardly been able to taste, let alone smell, the night before.

  “Oh, I’m all right. It’s been a while since I’ve had that much to drink, but I’ve felt worse.”

  When she’d woken that morning, her memory of the previous night seemed too strange to be true. She reached for her purse and found that it was stuffed with cash. Besides the money Boss Zhen had given her, she had the ten-, twenty-, and hundred-yuan bills she’d won from the drivers at liar’s dice. She felt like the scholar in that folktale, the one who dreamed of a hundred white knights telling him where to find treasure in his own backyard. Here it was, as improbable as myth. Sunny had looked around for a good place to stash it all, but nowhere in her room seemed safe enough. She had returned the lot of it to her purse, thinking that the next time she went with Taitai to City Shop, she would stop by an ICB and deposit the money.

  “Cao,” she said. “I wanted to ask you something. What’s a good, inexpensive area to live in that’s not too far from the city center?”

  “Well, I live in Hongqiao. Why? Are you thinking of moving?”

  “Maybe,” Sunny said. “It might be time for me to live somewhere a little less depressing.”

  He grinned at her. “You thinking of living alone or with roommates?”

  “Well, I don’t really know anyone I could room with,” she said. “I guess I could ask around Lanson Suites, see if the other housekeepers need someone.”

  “I’ll ask around too,” said Little Cao, looking a little smug.

  He was right, after all. It was time to invest in herself and in her life here, time to make plans for her own future. If moving to Shanghai meant that Sunny had chosen a life of uncertainty, she didn’t regret it. She only needed to think harder about how to make it work.

  It was comforting to know that a permanent ayi job could lead to other options. Rose had worked her whole life as a housekeeper only to discover one day that she couldn’t stand it anymore. That might have been Sunny one day too—it might still be. Just yesterday she’d been reminded of how arbitrarily the Zhens wielded their power—how they had decided, with no more than a moment’s debate, that Sunny and Karen would not attend the Expo. She was disgusted with herself for having been so let down and for wanting to go so much. But it wasn’t wrong to want to go. One day, she’d like to be able to buy things like Expo tickets for herself. If that day never came, it would still be nice to have other kinds of comforts. Something closer to what Rose had, perhaps. Not just a place to live, but a real home in the city.

  “What happened with Taitai and Qiang?” Sunny asked suddenly. She had been so absorbed in thoughts of her own life that she only now remembered that Taitai and Qiang had been trapped in the Expo. “Did you bail them out finally?”

  Little Cao gave a belly laugh. “You should have seen them lying there on the couches of the VIP room in the British pavilion. Empty glasses littered everywhere, like they’d had a party. The looks on their faces as guilty as if they were teenagers who had snuck into a love motel. You were right about the two of them after all.”

  Sunny dreaded the day ahead of her. When she got to Lanson Suites, she’d assess the situation. If tensions were high when she arrived, she would suggest taking Karen out for a drive or to the movies. Give the adults room to sort things out among themselves. It was only lately that she realized how much she had relied on the calm of her housekeeping job. And that was another reason moving to her own place would be good for her. If she had a space to come home to, maybe she would last longer as an ayi.

  It was twelve thirty when Sunny arrived at the apartment, but the household was just waking up. Karen came out first, dressed in a two-piece swimsuit and wearing heart-shaped sunglasses on top of her head.

  “Morning,” she said, flopping down on the couch next to Sunny.

  “Going swimming?”

  “Later, I think.” She wiggled forward and nestled her head in Sunny’s lap.

  “How are you feeling?” Sunny asked.

  “Better.”

  Sunny tugged a blanket off the back of the couch and draped it over Karen’s exposed midsection.

  Next, Qiang came in from smoking on the balcony. Sunny searched his expression for an indication as to what had happened between him and Taitai the night before but could not tell anything. After a brief hello, he disappeared into his room.

  Sunny had just finished reheating yesterday’s leftovers for a light lunch when Taitai came out of her room. Like Karen, she was dressed to swim.

  “Zao,” Sunny greeted her. “I warmed up some food—the others have already eaten.”

  “That’s all right,” Taitai said. “I had a little too much to drink last night. I’ll just eat some yogurt. It should be better for my stomach.”

  She whisked past Sunny to stand before the refrigerator.

  “How was the Expo?”

  “All right. We didn’t even try to see the China exhibit, the line was so long. But the Irish, the English…overstayed our welcome at the English one a bit. Got home pretty late.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and mixed her yogurt, just as if it were any old weekend morning. How skilled she was at the simple act of omission. No wonder she was able to keep Boss Zhen in the dark.

  “Oh, before I forget.” Taitai motioned for Sunny to follow her into the living room. She ducked behind the dry bar, rummaged through one of its cabinets, and lifted out a small shopping bag.

  “Here,” she said, presenting it to Sunny. “I picked this up for you. We do a lot of swimming in this family.”

  Inside, beneath a few layers of tissue, was soft red material. A swimsuit. Sunny felt her face grow hot. She didn’t mind accepting Taitai’s hand-me-down purses or taking home the leftover food from the Zhens’ kitchen, but this suit had been bought specifically for her. It was too personal a gift. She held the bag back out to Taitai.

  “It’s very kind, but not necessary. I’ve got a friend I can borrow from. I’ll bring a suit tomorrow.”

  “Aiya,” Taitai said. “You should have your own suit, and since it’s part of your job, I should provide it. It’s the way things should be.” Without waiting for a response, she disappeared into the hall. “I’m going to get my things, and then we’ll go down together.”

  So Sunny was left holding the small square shopping bag while Taitai roused her husband from his study and Karen from the couch. “Come, come, get changed!” Taitai called to Wei. “It’s going to get too crowded down there if we wait any longer.”

  Despite herself, Sunny experienced a rush of pleasure in lifting the light, woven handle of the bag between her fingers.

  In the pool-house changing room, she hung the suit from a hook on the bathroom stall door to admire it. It was a cherry-colored one-piece, as bright as the ones Sunny had seen on the Olympic swimmers on TV. NIKE, the tags said, and after twisting the suit this way and that, Sunny decided that she couldn’t tell the difference between the real thing and any number of fake Nike merchandise they sold beneath People’s Square or at the Shanghai Technology Market. There was no doubt, though, that this one was real. The
small paper bag it came in had even been marked with a logo.

  Sunny ripped the tags off with her hands. Then she took off her clothing, parted the suit by the shoulder straps, and stepped into it. Here, maybe, was where the real thing was better than the fake, because as she pulled it up over her hips, the fabric seemed to know just how far to stretch. When she was dressed, she came out of the stall to stand in front of the mirror. The suit fit perfectly, but the brightness of it was a little alarming. Sunny pictured the other maids watching her from up above and wondered if she looked like a taitai.

  Outside, Qiang, Wei, and Karen were seated at the far end of the pool, where they had managed to claim three deck chairs clustered together. Taitai was already in the water doing circular laps despite the pool being crowded with families. She darted past them beneath the water, coming up for air only when she was halfway around. When she saw Sunny walking toward the Zhens, she stopped.

  “How does it fit?” Lina asked, shielding her eyes against the sun.

  “It fits.” She wished that Taitai hadn’t yelled loud enough for the other sunbathers to turn and look at her.

  “Sunny, can you swim?” Karen asked.

  “Ayis can do everything, remember?”

  Karen grinned. “Then let’s go in!”

  “You go first. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Karen got up, abandoning her magazine and leaving wet patches on the fabric where her body had been. Sunny sat at the end of her chair and watched the girl race around to the deep end of the pool and take a running jump. In the next chair over, Boss Zhen cleared his throat and held out the magazine he was reading to Qiang. He pointed to an article, muttered something about rising apartment prices, and shook his head. It was the closest Sunny had seen them since the first moment they were reunited in the kitchen. Even if the air had not yet cleared between them, she sensed that the magazine was something of a peace offering.